Nightmare Army

“How’s the weather?” Tokaido, monitoring his insertion, asked.

“Overcast and breezy,” Bolan replied. “At least I’ll have no problem getting there.”

“So, you’re still green?” The hint of doubt in the hacker’s voice was clear.

“When I’m back, you’ll have to come up with me—you’ll love it.”

“Uh, yeah, we’ll see about that.”

Bolan grinned again. Tokaido often talked a good game, but the few times he’d called the younger man on it, he had preferred to stick with what he knew best—hacking and computer infiltration. And he was among the very best, no doubt, but it was obvious that his skill set lay in a completely different direction.

Now, as he prepared for a reverse launch, facing the canopy to make sure his lines were clear, Bolan felt a mix of adrenaline and anticipation, mixed with a healthy respect for what he was about to do. The wind up here was stronger than what he’d trained in, and he was already recalculating his speed toward his target, and most importantly, controlling his descent and sticking the landing once he got there. He’d be dead if he fractured an ankle or got hung up on power lines.

Bolan snugged his night-vision goggles over his eyes and checked his pistol, spare magazines and equipment in their various holsters and pouches. He took one more look at everything, weighing the pros and cons of the current conditions. His insertion window—the time just before daybreak, when guards would be tired and their perception and reaction times would be slower—was still open. But he had to go right now, before the first rays of sunlight lit the still-black horizon.

“Beginning insertion,” Bolan said. “Affirmative.”

Tokaido’s tone was all business, as well. “Good luck, Striker. Stony Man standing by.”

Taking up the slack lines, Bolan twitched them to make the sail lift into the air. The second the edge caught the steady breeze, the whole canopy inflated and shot up with a snap, making him brace himself to not get pulled off his feet. He glanced at the dim lights of the city below, the auto gating adjusting to prevent him from being blinded. When the next gust came along, he walked with it down the hill, letting the wing begin carrying him along until, with one more stop, he floated off the ground and into the night sky.

The wind off the mountains swiftly carried him high into the air. Bolan concentrated on getting enough altitude to ensure he was far enough above the sentries to avoid being spotted. Below his dangling feet, the valley was swathed in darkness, broken only by the eerie green circles of light coming from the wall. Toward the rear of the enclosure, the large villa they’d identified as Sevan’s loomed above every other building, almost topping the wall. Its large, tiled roof was Bolan’s target, and he steered toward it while keeping an eye on his variometer, which would tell him if he was leaving a strong wind current.

Maintaining his elevation wasn’t turning out to be a problem, but Bolan was a bit concerned about his forward speed. Even allowing for the stiff wind, he was approaching the village faster than he preferred and was concerned about bleeding enough off to land safely. They’d discussed aborting if the conditions weren’t right, but having gone this far, he was even more loath to come so close, only have to leave with nothing to show for his efforts.

About a kilometer out, Bolan pulled on both outer A-lines, bending the ends of the sail down in a formation called “big-ears.” This made the paraglider begin to slowly lose altitude while still heading toward the roof of the villa, exactly as he had planned.

The large, black canopy, with Bolan dangling underneath, passed silently over the rear of the village and the bored pair of thugs on that wall, close enough that he heard a brief snatch of their conversation. His auto-translator picked up the words and told him that one was complaining about not feeling well. The two men were both in the roofed guardhouse—as they had been every evening at this time—instead of patrolling. The hole in the security and the pattern of the prevailing winds across the valley were two reasons Bolan had used this approach.

Alternating his attention between the approaching roof and his variometer, he kept his approach steady, trying to bring himself down as gently as possible. Less than ten meters from the roof, the wind gusted hard, making the paraglider suddenly rise again. He tugged on his B-lines to bleed more air from his canopy, dipping down twice as fast as when he had used the “big ears” method.

Unfortunately he was also gliding right past the villa. Even though he shifted his weight hard right to bring himself around, Bolan skimmed past the edge of the rooftop, missing it by less than a meter.

“Striker?” Tokaido said. “GPS shows you’ve missed the primary landing zone. Is there a problem?”

“Let you know in a second—” Bolan whispered as he fought for control. He had lost too much altitude now and was in danger of either getting entangled in power lines or gliding into the side of a building. Releasing the B-lines, he pushed hard on his speed bar with his foot, decreasing the angle of attack on the wing’s leading edge in a desperate attempt to gain height.

It worked—sort of. Entering the airspace of what looked like a wide, main road that ran through the village, Bolan felt the wind channeled here shove him up—straight toward the wall of a house. Easing up on the speed bar, he lifted his legs as high as he could, narrowly avoiding smacking the top of the roof. He missed, but now out of the air channel, he began losing altitude again.

“Striker? You’re still moving. What’s your sitrep?” Tokaido asked.

A pancake, if I don’t find a place to set down soon, Bolan thought but didn’t say. Instead he was looking for any place he could set down without injuring himself in the next few seconds. The village sloped down from here, and Bolan saw what looked like a small, three-story hotel coming up. A large water tank took up a third of the flat roof, but it was his best chance—hell, his only chance—to land, and he took it, aiming for the flat expanse and pulling on his B-lines again to begin coming down.

The induced stall averaged a drop rate of about 5 meters per second, but as he got closer, it seemed the roof was rushing up even faster at Bolan. At the same time, he was sailing over the building and there was a very real danger he was going to overshoot his landing zone again.

Gritting his teeth, Bolan pulled even harder on the B-lines, spilling that extra bit of air and causing him to come down with a thump on the rooftop. The moment he landed, Bolan hit the ground in a forward shoulder roll, heedless of entangling himself in the lines. The canopy snapped and fluttered around him, but the moment he stopped moving, he quickly gathered in the paraglider before a guard happened to catch sight of the mass of flapping black cloth.

“Striker, are you all right?” Kurtzman was on the line now. “What is your sitrep, over?”

Entangled in a shroud of canopy and lines, Bolan was still listening for shouts or any sign that his entry had been detected. Only when he didn’t hear any sort of alarm or doors opening did he whisper, “Striker is down. Overshot primary landing zone, had to go for secondary. No injuries.” He began to stuff the paraglider into his backpack.

“You’re a good half klick from your target and you have to improvise a way past his house guards. And the sun’s about to come up.”

Bolan glanced east and confirmed Kurtzman’s biggest concern—the sky on the horizon was already shaded with pink and orange from the oncoming daybreak. “Then I better move out.”

“Striker, you don’t think we should abort?”

“Absolutely not, Bear. Look, I’m here now. Even if we called it off, I’d have to get out somehow anyway, so I might as well get what I came for before I do.” Bolan shrugged out of his harness and added it to the backpack, which he hid beneath one of the water tower’s steel legs.

“Well, watch your ass,” Kurtzman said. “The way this op started, it wouldn’t surprise me if you tripped, fell off the roof and broke your neck.”

Despite the circumstances, Bolan couldn’t help grinning at the very real concern he heard under Kurtzman’s grumbling. “Have I ever told you how much I love your optimistic attitude, Bear?”

“No, ’cause you know better.”

“Exactly. Striker out.” Trotting to the side of the building, Bolan tested the seemingly sturdy ceramic drainpipe that went all the way to the ground. When it didn’t move under his weight, he swung a leg over, braced his feet on the wall and gripped the pipe with both hands as he descended to the ground. Halfway down, the pipe shifted enough to make him stop and wait in case it was coming loose. It didn’t move again, and Bolan reached the alleyway without further incident.

At this hour the town was still quiet, although Bolan saw lights coming on in various windows as the populace began to wake up. There were still plenty of shadows to hide in, and Bolan made the best of it, flitting from darkness to darkness, all the while keeping an eye on the walls overhead.

He covered the distance to Sevan’s villa in less than ten minutes and took a position in a narrow alley between what appeared to be a bakery—the smell of bread baking filled his nostrils—and what looked to be either an abandoned or holiday house for someone, with tightly shuttered windows and a securely locked door.

Bolan’s attention, however, was on the front gate made from thick, black iron bars that guarded the entrance to Sevan’s estate. The rest of the perimeter was enclosed by an eight-foot-high stone fence that had matching vertical iron bars at the top, which were themselves topped by welded spikes sticking out at a forty-five-degree angle. Two guards paced back and forth in front of the gate. Unlike the slackers on the wall, both these guys looked alert and ready. He studied the pair for a few minutes, noticing that although they were definitely on guard, they also seemed oddly distracted. One shook his head every few seconds, as if trying to clear it. The other kept wiping his forehead and cheeks with his sleeve. Viewing them in the monochromatic night vision, Bolan couldn’t tell if either man was flushed or showed any other signs of incapacitation.

“Striker to Stony Man, I’m going to need that security window and camera break, after all,” he muttered as he melted back into the shadows. “West wall, corner.”

“Roger that, Striker,” Tokaido replied. “What is your position?”

By the time the hacker finished replying, Bolan was at the rear corner of the empty house. As he knew from the overhead view, the road cornered at the fence and followed the perimeter. “Ten meters away.”

“All right...bringing security camera online...”

Bolan divided his attention between the two guards who had paused by the gate and the steadily lightening eastern sky. “Let’s go, Akira, the sun isn’t going to stop rising.”

“Just making sure the inside is clear. Won’t help much if you drop down into the arms of a couple goons, now, would it? Okay, go on my mark... Three, two, one, mark.”

Still mindful of the two guards, Bolan stepped out from cover and walked casually across the street to the corner of the fence, slightly stooped over, even muffling a yawn. Just another early riser heading to work. Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw one of the guards look in his direction, but he didn’t turn or quicken his pace in any way as he reached the stone wall.

The second he was around the corner and out of view, Bolan leaped for the top of the fence, grabbing the rough stone with his gloved hands. Pulling himself up, he threw a leg over, grabbed the row of iron spikes and held there for a few seconds while scoping the inside. True to Tokaido’s word, the immaculate lawn was deserted, with the villa increasingly lit from behind as the sun kept rising. Bolan gave it another five count, then climbed over the spikes and jumped to the ground, staying in the shadows formed by the inside wall corner. The area here was calm, with no breeze.

“I’m on the grounds,” Bolan reported. “Keep that camera looped for another minute. I’ll contact once I’m inside the building.”

“Roger that.”

Drawing an odd weapon that looked like a small paint gun, Bolan removed a plastic vial from a waist pouch and screwed it on to the receiver just ahead of the trigger. Taking his SIG-Sauer in his right hand, he checked right and left one last time, then started down the wall on his left, wanting to be sure he was out of sight of the gate guards before entering the main building.

He had only taken a few steps when two black-brown shapes trotted around the corner. Upon seeing him, the two Doberman-Rottweiler mixes didn’t snarl or bark, just accelerated into a silent run, muscular legs churning the grass as they sped toward their target.

Waiting until they were only a few steps away, Bolan squeezed the trigger of the strange pistol in his left hand twice. The gun spit a fine mist into the dogs’ path as they leaped at him. The second they jumped, Bolan dropped to the ground and rolled out of their path. After two turns, he rolled onto his back, brought the real pistol up and aimed at the dogs behind him.

Deprived of their target, the dogs landed on the ground and turned to come at him again. However they weren’t moving as quickly as before; in fact, both dogs stumbled as they tried to charge at him and ended up sinking back to the ground, whining in confusion as they struggled to get back on their feet. Within a few seconds, both dogs were out cold.

Bolan got up, careful to stay several feet away from the dissipating cloud of a fast-acting, powerful tranquilizer. With a silenced pistol not all that silent, and dart guns, blowguns or crossbows only able to shoot one projectile at a time, John “Cowboy” Kissinger, Stony Man Farm’s chief armorer, had come up with the best way to silently eliminate multiple guard animals with minimal risk of injury to the defender. The spray pistol had been extensively tested, and other than wind dispersal, performed excellently in the field.

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